milliways_bar | (no subject)

There had been yelling, that Saturday morning. Rae's mother had come home from an early grocery-shopping trip to find a vegetarian version of Charlie's sausage-hashbrown pie cooking in the oven, and a ten-year old alone in the kitchen, reading while she waited for it to finish. Charlie had gone to open the coffeehouse hours before Rae woke up, leaving Rae alone in the house, as happened often enough. And, it being a cold, dreary, January day, Rae had wanted something heartier and more warming than cereal with milk for breakfast.

Rae had shown her irate mother that everything was all right, that she had been extra-careful and safe while chopping onions and shredding potatoes, chopping up kale and cooking everything (which hadn't phased her mother a bit), and explained that she'd cooked for herself when left home alone loads of times before and had been just fine (which actually made things worse).

It's just as well that the door to Milliways appeared in the door to Rae's room, where she had been sent. The girl was still hungry, and still smarting - from the assumption that she couldn't do it on her own just as much as from being grounded.

And there was a kitchen, easily within reach now. She wasn't technically leaving her room, since her room didn't deign to show up when she had opened her bedroom door. That isn't her fault at all.

So there is a young girl in the Milliways kitchen, this morning, shredding potatoes using a large cheese-grater and generally illustrating her opinion that adult supervision is something that happens to other people.

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"Making a breakfast pie," the girl answers, looking up from the grater with a return smile. She takes this opportunity to pause for a moment - grating so many potatoes after having already grated potatoes for the first, lost pie is tiring her arm. "It'll have eggs and cheese and potatoes and kale and caramelized onions and herbs in it. You're welcome to have some once it's done, if you like."

"If I'm to share your food", he suggests - and he even recognises almost all the ingredients - "I should help in its making. What can I do?"

"Could you chop the kale and the onion?" the girl asks, putting down the grater and showing him where the round white onion the size of a baseball and the thick, leafy green kale is by one of the cutting boards. "They're washed and ready to go, I just knew the potatoes would take more time and so was doing them first. The onion'll need to be diced, and then the diced onion rinsed so its flavor mellows out, and the kale will need to be chopped up really fine."

"Gladly", he says with a nod and begins with the onion. "You cook often, I'd guess?"

"Often enough," Rae nods, slightly wry. More often than my parents know, she doesn't add.

"I enjoy seeing what I can make, and enjoy eating it afterwards."

He shoots her a sidelong grin.

"Then you must have learned to make it all enjoyable to eat."

"I'm still learning," she admits with a wry smile in return, as she resumes grating the potatoes. When she has to take some of the potatoes out from under the grater, she sets them in a bowl lined with thin cloth. "But even when it doesn't turn out just right, that makes the next time that much better."

"Because you can tell where you went wrong", he says with a nod. "My name is Athelstan, by the way."

"Nice to meet you, Athelstan!" the girl beams at him, moving to gather the corners of the cloth with the potato shreds inside. "My name's Rae."

She puts pressure on the bundle of potato, squeezing what water she can from them, letting it drip down into the bowl.

It's hard to resist returning the smile just as widely, and he doesn't try.

"Nice to meet you as well, Rae. I can only get potatoes here."

Sunshine blinks at him, surprised. "You can't get potatoes at home?"

"They're... practically a staple, in my world."

"Not in my part of it. They grow on Earth, I know, but we haven't yet discovered the place where they are."

"Oh!" the girl says, intrigued. "I hadn't known."

Potatoes are just... everywhere, to her. Like eggs, and butter, and cheeses.

"What about kale?"

"Kale, we have. And onions too - really everything in your pie except potatoes."

"You've had potatoes here, though, right? You can fry them, or bake them, or boil or mash them, they're really good lots of ways."

Stick'em inna stew?

"Here, yes, several times." He smiles. "I can see why they're a staple, they're very good and filling as well."

"Mm-hm," Rae nods. "People sometimes grate them like this, and fry them in oil and make what are called hashbrowns. Or they can make potato pancakes called latkes, too."

The potatoes are properly squeezed, much dryer now than they were. She sets them aside, and moves to set the oven to pre-heat, and to get the eggs and milk out of the fridge.

"There's lots of foods here that are almost impossible to get back home, nowadays," she says, feeling better referring to the war obliquely than outright saying since the wars started. "What new thing have you tried here that you like the most?"

"Chocolate", he says immediately. "It's unlike anything we have at home, the only sweet things to be had there are fruit and honey."

"Oh! Chocolate!" Rae breathes, almost unable to fathom coming from a world completely ignorant of the best taste in existence.

"Good thing you can come here, then! Chocolate's the best."

Athelstan grins.

"It's one of many things I give thanks for, about this place."

"I'm always thankful for chocolate," the girl grins. "Charlie brings me a package of chocolate pinwheel cookies almost every day."

Much later, Sunshine's secret recipe for Killer Zebras will show a close family relationship to its ancestor, the humble chocolate pinwheel.

"And who is Charlie?" he asks with easy curiosity.